1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to data storage and communications and more particularly to data matching using flow based packet data storage.
2. Description of Related Art
For transmission over communications networks, data has been organized into packets, frames, and cells. Bundling data into these packets, frames, and cells assists routers and switches in the communication network to handle a manageable amount of data. Large amounts of data such as files may be separated into hundreds of packets. Thus, messages such as data requests or data responses for these large amounts of data may also span over hundreds of packets. When packets get misordered or retransmitted, reassembling the packets into the messages can be difficult and time consuming.
In some situations, incoming data needs to be matched with data stored in memory. In one example, in order to prevent redundancy and reduce communication bandwidth, a request for data is matched with data stored in local memory and retrieved from the memory without transmitting the request for data to retrieve the data over the communications network. However, matching the data may be problematic when the packets for related data are stored in different locations in the memory.
A Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) stack does reassemble and sort out packets. The TCP stack does handle packets destined to a socket and then sequentially stores the packets from the socket in pages of memory. The TCP stack also strips the header of the packet and transfers the payload data of the packet to the applications in the application layer. Ethernet switches and IP routers also perform flow based queuing, where packets for a flow are stored in queues. The packets for a flow may be organized on the same page of memory or by linked lists.
These protocols, switches, and routers may have stored packets in memory based on a flow to solve different problems such as buffering and queuing. However, none of the prior art systems have stored the packets in memory based on flow to match data.